The bishop spent around half of his long life in prison or labour camps, the Catholic news agency added.

The bishop’s death means that there is now only one Chinese bishop still being held in secret detention, it added. His name is James Su Zhimin, from Baoding, a city around 90 miles from Beijing, and he has been held since October 1997.

Thaddeus Ma Daqin, the bishop of Shangahi, has been confined to a seminary outside Shanghai since using his ordination to denounce the Party's control of religion in 2012.

Cosmas Shi Enxiang was ordained as a priest in 1947, two years before Chairman Mao’s Communist Party seized power and set about jailing Christian leaders, driving out missionaries and dismantling or destroying churches.

Bishop Shi’s troubles began in 1954, three years after the officially atheist Communist Party had formally severed ties with the Vatican.

He was arrested for the first time that year and spent much of the following three decades forced to perform hard labour in Heilongjiang and Shanxi provinces, according to UCA News.

He was ordained a bishop in China’s underground Catholic church in 1982 but was imprisoned again between 1989 and 1993 before his final arrest in 2001.

Today there are an estimated 12 million Catholics in China, many of whom refuse to worship within the Communist Party controlled Catholic Patriotic Association.

Members of China’s underground Catholic church have found themselves affected by the “anti-church” campaign currently sweeping Zhejiang province.